We baffle prejudice and
disappoint conjecture; and from being so to others, begin to be objects
of curiosity and wonder even to ourselves. We are no more those
hackneyed commonplaces that we appear in the world: an inn restores us
to the level of nature, and quits scores with society! I have certainly
spent some enviable hours at inns--sometimes when I have been left
entirely to myself, and have tried to solve some metaphysical problem,
as once at Witham-common, where I found out the proof that likeness is
not a case of the association of ideas--at other times, when there have
been pictures in the room, as at St. Neot's (I think it was) where I
first met with Gribelin's engravings of the Cartoons, into which I
entered at once, and at a little inn on the borders of Wales, where
there happened to be hanging some of Westall's drawings, which I
compared triumphantly (for a theory that I had, not for the admired
artist) with the figure of a girl who had ferried me over the Severn,
standing up in the boat between me and the twilight--at other times I
might mention luxuriating in books, with a peculiar interest in this
way, as I remember sitting up half the night to read Paul and Virginia,
which I picked up at an inn at Bridgewater, after being drenched in the
rain all day; and at the same place I got through two volumes of Madame
D'Arblay's Camilla.
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